One of the weaknesses of the Phottix Strato triggers is that the shoe isn't a great fit and it doesn't lock, so I decided to use one that needed repairing, to experiment with a case modification. I found that Sonia do an excellent replacement hotshoe for the Vivitar 283/285. It has a PC sync socket and a test button and can be very easily be attached to any case that has room for a hot shoe. The strato trigger doesn't have enough room to replace the hotshoe that it comes with but with a little imagination the hotshoe can be placed on the front of the trigger so that it can be mounted horizontally.
The first step is to disassemble the shoe. Remove the four screws and with a small amount of force the plastic mounting plate can be removed. You can see that the sonia shoe is more or less a solid block of metal. All the moving parts are hidden inside it.
The next step is open the trigger up by removing the three screws. Don't worry about losing the little spring off the built-in shoe, you will be saying good-bye to that forever. Take the front cover and drill a hole in the "O" of the word Strato. Make it a little bigger than the centre post so you have some wiggle room.
The next step is pretty nerve-racking. You will need to mount the square metal plate inside the housing, but the posts for the screws are in the way so you will need to undercut them. I used a dremmel too with a rotating disk. I slid the plate in and gave it a bit of a bash to make it sit flush.
Once the plate is in place you can attach the hot-shoe with the four mounting screws and then solder the wires in place. It shouldn't make any real difference which is attached to which tab on the shoes, but ideally it should match the configuration on the original hot shoe.
Thats all there is to it. It took me a while to get it done and the dremmel tool made it sound like a trip to the dentists, but it wasn't terribly difficult and I won't suffer any embarrassing connection problems.
One of the weaknesses of the Phottix Strato triggers is that the shoe isn't a great fit and it doesn't lock, so I decided to use one that needed repairing, to experiment with a case modification. I found that Sonia do an excellent replacement hotshoe for the Vivitar 283/285. It has a PC sync socket and a test button and can be very easily be attached to any case that has room for a hot shoe. The strato trigger doesn't have enough room to replace the hotshoe that it comes with but with a little imagination the hotshoe can be placed on the front of the trigger so that it can be mounted horizontally.
The first step is to disassemble the shoe. Remove the four screws and with a small amount of force the plastic mounting plate can be removed. You can see that the sonia shoe is more or less a solid block of metal. All the moving parts are hidden inside it.
The next step is open the trigger up by removing the three screws. Don't worry about losing the little spring off the built-in shoe, you will be saying good-bye to that forever. Take the front cover and drill a hole in the "O" of the word Strato. Make it a little bigger than the centre post so you have some wiggle room.
The next step is pretty nerve-racking. You will need to mount the square metal plate inside the housing, but the posts for the screws are in the way so you will need to undercut them. I used a dremmel too with a rotating disk. I slid the plate in and gave it a bit of a bash to make it sit flush. 
Once the plate is in place you can attach the hot-shoe with the four mounting screws and then solder the wires in place. It shouldn't make any real difference which is attached to which tab on the shoes, but ideally it should match the configuration on the original hot shoe.
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Instead of cutting the posts for the screws you can cut the plate. You could even get rid of the plate and use washers instead.
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